Escape Kit: The Mysterious Murder (Play at home)

Perfect for a party

On Sunday, November 15, at around 9 p.m., the Berkshire police received an alarming call from an anonymous guest who stayed at the Thompson’s Mansion where wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Thompson took place. Mary Thompson was found dead in her room. Cause of death : unknown. No signs or break-in….

I must admit, we’d never heard of Escape Kit so didn’t really know what to expect. I gather they started in France and have now expanded to the UK having translated a number of their games into English. I’m always a bit dubious about foreign language games being translated into English just in case something gets lost in translation. Fortunately those fears were unfounded and arguably the English was better than some native English games we’ve played.

At the time of writing, Escape Kit have four games available in English, all with different themes and difficulty settings. We chose The Mysterious Murder as it seemed to have a decent difficulty level and we thought it would keep us occupied for a while. The other thing that got our attention with this game was that it was designed to be set up and organised like a crime scene, interesting.

The aim of the game is to identify the murderer and their motives. Once you have that you need to go to a website and enter in the name of the accused to see if you’re correct.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

If you’ve ever watched a detective show on TV you’ll be very familiar with those little number ‘tags’ that are dotted all over the place to mark where evidence was found, and that is what Escape Kit are going for with this game.

It’s hard to review this game as purely and escape at home experience as in a way it was a bit more than that and was closer to a group activity, the type of thing you may do for team building or a birthday party. Saying that, it does still work as an escape at home experience, and that is how we treated it.

It takes a little while to print everything (you need a printer capable of doing two-sided prints) and then you have to cut it out and position it around your house – although you can just put it all in one room if you’re feeling a little lazy.

PUZZLES

None of the puzzles were particularly challenging and we were able to get through it all in about 26 minutes (we did have it all in one space though). But, you will find a mixture of puzzles, obviously a fair amount of logic and reasoning but everything is paper based so you only interact with what you have in front of you.

There was one puzzle which we have seen before, and I must admit to liking, but they had put a slightly different spin on it making it not as simple as you may first think.

CLUE SYSTEM

We’re not actually sure if there was a clue system or if there was one, how it worked. We were able to do it without clues, but from reading the materials on their website I think there is a ‘cheat sheet’ that can be used if you get stuck. As I mentioned earlier this is really designed to be a party/family game so I think one person would be in charge of this and could get or give hints when needed.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This game doesn’t really scratch the escape room itch, but if you wanted a party game where you can have multiple teams completing the game either simultaneously or one-after-another then this would certainly be suitable. At 22 euros it isn’t the cheapest game, but when you factor in that many teams in your party can play with the one purchase then actually it isn’t too bad, especially when you compare it to some online rooms that could be £10 for one connection.

This game is heavy on the ink though so do factor that in if you are low on ink (we printed it in greyscale and had no problems).

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Printer (and paper) – capable of two sided printing
• Internet enabled device – for start and end

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: 26:39

Website: https://escape-kit.com/en/

*Disclaimer: we weren’t charged for this experience, but this has not influenced our review.